Oppenheim Arts & Letters

Geert's Reminder

YouTube poster "NuclearNympho", "Geert Wilders a True Hero."  September 23, 2010: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-sAkOLJK6M

# # #

Christopher Hitchens Defeats Stage IV

Thanks to C-Span and "hitchwatch" on YouTube for this extraordinary treat.

Whatever one's position on divinity and metaphysics, one's enthusiasm for the life of the mind, lively writing, and passionate opinion cannot help but find the frame of the heroic in Christopher Hitchens' sprawling and spritely from Left-to-Right-of-Center odyssey and, well illustrated in the above hour-long interview, a vigorous near end to which he might yet give the slip,the spirit, or perhaps one should call it "mentality", that fights the many good fights it may however battered and reduced the body.

Death's a cheat that artists and writers frequently cheat right back by the not going gently and by leaving the residue of their existence--i.e., their artifacts, a term as applicable to the 19th Century as it is particularly appropriate to the 21st--in cultural memory and institutional facility. 

Past tense or present, we'll be reading "Hitch" and looking over his appearances in public for a fair while yet.

# # #

Final Year -- Oppenheim's Princedom College

Estate: 850-sq.ft., rented.

Gardens and Grounds: 6x9 nominal feet of elevated outdoor container garden complemented, down the hill from main administration, by a gravel track and, separately, a fire road, each terminating at a small sanitation station.

Facilities: Library--2000 volumes; Blu-Ray Theater (7.1 Surround), bar, cabin kitchen, and office.

Tuition: rising.

Orientation: cut the bilge talk and settle down.

I would like to call this my fourth year at "Princedom College," but the truth is that it's my fifth.  Having arrived about six months after suffering a fire in another apartment building, but one in the Baltimore-Washington Corridor, I established myself, as it were, by first hammering together 15 O'Sullivan bookcases (don't bother look up that one--the company's gone belly-up with the economy). 

The next year with a girlfriend aboard, I replaced a failing computer by building one myself--it's ageing but working fine, and my premise then may apply now: I control its parts and can swap them out or add to them as I see fit.

A year or two later, having stopped dancing (yes, contributing mightily to my motivation in choosing this town for my very own think-tank -- who else's? -- was a bit of "following the bar"), also singing (always flirtatious, that), I came to the conclusion that there was less and less and less of me, and even my Jewish identity, which I had not much embraced across 40 years, would disappear without drastic measures.

Goodbye, girlfriend.

Hello, synagogue.

With an odd misadventure or two, I've awakened in the very best writer/musician/photographer's office and studio (also bar, grill, and home theater) any "creative type" has ever had anywhere, would only that it and I were located in L.A., Manhattan, or San Francisco (or the Hamptons) for just that bit more of realspace business and social opportunity.

Of course, one might turn that minor irritation inside-out by boasting the remarkable solitude afforded by the space.

Then again: as my realspace presence--my presence in the lives of others in immediate surrounds--has all but disappeared, both my cyberpresence and the presence of the world in my space--my head as supported by 850-sq.ft. of appropriate physical plant--have grown immeasurably large, perhaps too much so, for how many others may one personality serve intimately and well?  Answer today: unknown. 

In any case, if "friends are the family we make", mine now extends from Alexandria, Egypt to Sidney, Australia--much good that does, however, with the flu, ageing in general, the shadow now of leukemia watching over my progress, digress, and regress.

Does one produce an economy from one's desktop as well?

Francis Ford Coppola's "virtual film studio", www.zoetrope.com reminds me that since 2000 I have written 1,052 criticisms of photographs, eleven reviews of screenplays (it takes far more energy to look over a so-so screenplay than it does an okay to not-so-okay photograph), and 12 reviews of short stories.

I've been busy sharing my thoughts at www.modelmayhem.com as well: 5,943 is the post-to-board count over there.

This blog: more than 800 posts . . . .

I fear I might retreat more deeply than I have to date and become quiet for a long time.

(Not a chance)!

# # #

May Angels Be Always More Swift Than Devils

That above: a good message and true.

Credit: Composition and Music Production- Mark Eliyahu; Lyrics - Dvir Cohen Eraki & Gabriel Meyer Halevi; Camera & Editing - Sarit Maor; Project Producer - Lee Ziv; Studio - ND Siani.  Share URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6eW_V3ph94.

Shalom.

# # #

Four Fight Songs (Sort of -- Not Too Sure About The Beatles) . . . .

*** *** ***

# # #

A Word on Cybersocializing

Consider the three circles of dwell:

1. Text: Text-based awareness; Text-based correspondence; Text-based two-way realtime chatter.
2. Voice (Audio): Cell or POTS talk; Skype (if visual off).
3. Voice and Body (Audio/Visual): Skype (is what I know).

Social dimensions involved from first contact:

1. intimacy--how well we may know that person on the other side of the exchange;
2. trust--how much we may invest or risk by way of affection, concern, effort, time, and money in the relationship whatever its character;
3. Mutuality--determination of how much we may have in common and how much we may go on to do together.

Traditional Native American diplomatic invitation: "Speak, so that we may see you."

Since my Mosaic days as contractor (employe of one) at the Office of Naval Research (Public Affairs Office) around 1996, the WorldWideWeb, in the mere span of a dog's life, has grown up.  What started as a system through which to publish information or exchange it at a comparatively horse-and-buggy pace (I'm thinking about bulletin boards accessed via dial-up connections--or accessed by dialing directly into the board's hosting computer . . . .) has become a highly democratized and global communications universe extending for the common user the reach of mind and spirit far, far beyond most geophysical, language, political, and social barriers.

Here we learn we are our minds as channeled through our typing skills, voices, and the manners in which we present our good looks, but if we really want to go somewhere, eventually, we may want to get the feet there too.  Where relationships are involved, whether for business or love, that brings up the question of who, really, we have been "speaking" with and whether we're on a good track with them--accurately perceived (in both directions), secure, and in line with expectations.

Long before this but within the communicating-via-computer era, I have experienced a profound difference between relations bounded in text, abetted by voice, or, oh my god, visited in the flesh, and the difference is in the appraisal of the authenticity and social weight of the other party in relation to the arrangement, integration, and value of the personal sphere of relationships in its totality. 

You exchange through text some remarks with somebody on the web . . . big deal.

Somebody picks up the phone, calls or receives, and there's the first and only "This is so-and-so", which whatever the concerns of the content of the call, provides the first experience of the voice--a somehow more real person has been added to one's social space.

Through Skype arrives the picture-phone of the 1964 World's Fair (and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey) but without the handset: screen, webcam.  Hands free.  Et voilà: whoever it is is no longer someone with whom one has exchanged throughts by way of sentences and paragraphs in an interest group, nor someone with whom one "has only" talked on the phone, a voice in the wildness.  Warts and all, dazzling as ever, there is that other person--and behind them: bookshelves, family rooms, kitchens, offices, bars (that would be me if we Skype with while I'm seated at my laptop computer), garages, workshops, and so on.

In my experience, voice-to-voice (telephone) has been the minimum contact level necessarily to exchange and respond to advice.  A finely crafted letter may have its influence, but there's more of the animal--or two animals in earnest--in live conversation.  

Voice-to-voice I would think also the minimum for establishing a meeting.

Take it up a notch (cue the grinning friends): actually seeing persons in their homes or workplaces (or both) in Sidney, the Scottish Borders, Haifa, Barcelona, Peoria (something like it but in Indiana) . . . and, perhaps magically, one may have a real conversation with a more than real enough person free of the masks and layers of artifice afforded by other web-based strategems or implicit in voice-only exchanges.

In the larger schemes of many things, what we have first taken up as new, cool, and nifty communication-enabling gadgets have by their numbers produced a novel and as yet uncharacterized global communicating behavior: we are talking, for sure -- are we speaking honestly, with integrity, about ourselves, about others?  How are We using Our Collective New Powers to underwrite new or enhanced freedoms, improve our own autonomous-responsible personal behavior, boost human social potential and quality of life locally and globally?

Whoever you are, whatever your ambitions or designs, however you have put together you heart, your politics, your social networks, your career, and your money, in whatever way you have gone about improving the world or improving yourself, I am not even as far away as down the hall from you--and, of course, it works the other way too.  Sooner rather than later, we're going to figure out how to work with one another as if sharing an office--or a household--and, inevitably, in some fashion, we're going to rearrange our "realspace" existence to do it.

May we all be honest with ourselves and others; may we proceed with caution; and, whatever goodness may come through all who have brought themselves into the New Expanded Communicating Community, may we sort out our issues together and be brave about it.

# # #